Edible Futures

Where are you?
Bristol

Online at www.ediblefutures.com

Size and type of farm
2.5 acres - horticulture

Established
2012

Legal structure
Community Interest Company

Number of staff
There are currently 4 part time workers who all work as self employed. 2.4 FTE

Annual turnover and average surplus (profit)
Our annual turnover up until 2019 was in the region of £15,000. All surplus is reinvested into the business for the next year. Turnover this year will be higher and is forecast to be £25,000.

Direct Sales Model
CSA salad and veg box scheme.

We supply around 50 households with a weekly salad bag which they collect from various drop off points in and around Bristol. Subscribers receive salad 44 weeks a year, but their payments are spread over 12 months, helping the farm to balance its books through the hungry gap. We have also done direct sales to cafes and restaurants. Before 2020 about 50% of our trade was to restaurants and 50% was distributed through Salad Drop, so that we don’t rely entirely on one sales outlet. This year we have taken on more land and used this to set up a veg box scheme.

Why have you chosen this model and what are the main benefits?
Direct sales enable the grower to capture a far greater proportion of the food pound, than sales to shops or wholesalers. Having drop off points linked in with other local independent businesses supports them too as people will often buy things from them when they come to collect their box.

Developing a membership of subscribers offers the ability to spread your income over the year. In our ‘Salad Drop’ scheme, subscribers get salad for 10 months a year, but their payment for it is spread over 12 months. A subscriber model also affords you stability in that your customer base is very spread out. If you are reliant on one or two wholesalers you are more vulnerable, than if you are dependent on a hundred subscribers.

The model allows us to develop individual relationships with people across our community, which builds up loyalty, relationships and a better food culture. The Solidarity Veg Box model [see below] has now allowed us to reach outside of the small subset of local people who would personally subscribe to a veg box. This is a massive benefit to this model.

Most importantly, direct sales models allow small farmers to run workable business, and therefore keep practicing agroecology, which has multiple benefits for our ecology, food system, local economies and communities.

What are your essential tools/equipment/pieces of software?
• Using a ‘shopperfy’ web platform has been useful to set this scheme up. It definitely isn’t perfect for the box scheme sales system, but was accessible and more or less fit-for-purpose for our needs. We are now looking to shift over to Bucky Box as a web platform.

• Having a good promotional video has also been really useful for publicity.

What are the key factors that helped with development?
Having good social and communication skills to build relationships with potential buyers, members and supporters is key. Less tangibly but no less significantly, being a visible and respected small farm in our community is key to getting subscribers to both household and solidarity veg boxes. This is based on multiple personal relationships, but also having a social media presence and accessible website. The LWA have also supported us with press releases and social media which has been a massive help in terms of gaining subscriptions. The fact that one of my coworkers was able to build a website was also key, but might be a skill that would have to be outsourced if not available in-house.

Having good drop off points is really important to this model - in retrospect I would have worked out our veg box drop off points further in advance so they were better organised and better distributed over target communities. We’re currently sharing a drop off point with another small farm which can cause confusion with customers about what they’re picking up.

This year, the owner of our new field has allowed us to use it rent free. This, along with the £1,000 donation from Rosanna Morris who sold some ‘Black Lives Matter’ prints on-line and gave us the funds has been really helpful in adapting the business for the solidarity boxes.

What has been the impact of Covid-19 on your business and how did you adapt?
This year we have set up another direct sales model we’ve called ‘Solidarity Veg Box’ in response to the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. The Solidarity Veg Box scheme came about from securing an additional 2 acre field for veg production for the 2020 season and a desire for at least some of this veg to reach local people experiencing food poverty. Members of the public can go onto the Edible Futures website and sign up for either a regular ‘Household Veg Box,’ or a ‘Solidarity Veg Box’ that they pay for but do not personally receive, so this is essentially a donation. People can opt to buy a solidarity veg box either weekly, monthly or as a one off. Edible Futures builds up a bank of free veg boxes that we can give away to people in food poverty. In order to reach people in the greatest need we have teamed up with grass-roots community groups, including Borderlands which works with destitute asylum seekers, to distribute our Solidarity Veg Boxes for us. We currently distribute twenty Solidarity boxes each week, and hope to run this as long as we can keep raising funds.